Plucky German girl endures Holocaust

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, March 26, 2006

In some ways, "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak, author of "I Am the Messenger," will be a hard sell for kids. It's a 552-page story about the Holocaust, written from the point of view of Death. The fact that Death comes to everyone is a theme (on the first page, in fact, is the sentence "You are going to die"). Many sad things happen. Many good people get treated very badly, and many times the sad events are made sadder by Death's insistence on messing up the chronological order, leaving the reader waiting for the moment where it will swoop down for the poor soul.

But if the legions of goth children are any indication, kids are not afraid to look on the dark side.

Besides, Death, as Zusak has written him, has a morbid sense of humor.

In "The Book Thief," Death is the narrator, but a young girl -- a book thief -- is the central character. Liesel Meminger is the daughter of a Communist in Nazi Germany. Death first meets Liesel in January 1939, when she's 9 years old, riding a packed train with her mother and younger brother. Within those cramped quarters, her younger brother dies. She acquires the moniker "the book thief" when Death sees her take a book from one of the grave diggers.

To compound the loss of her brother, Liesel has to contend with the fact that she's on her way to foster parents, Rosa and Hans Huberman, in a small German town called Molching. Luckily for her, they are good people, even if Rosa has a bit of a foul mouth. (Young German scholars will learn helpful travel phrases as "What are you -- holes looking at?") Liesel grows into the rhythms of her new life, acquiring a best friend in young Rudy Steiner, growing ever closer to her new papa, Hans, and even gaining access to a strange and wonderful library in the house of the mayor's wife.

As the story builds, Zusak deftly ties in historical bits to the narrative. Using the omnipresent voice of Death allows him to skip around in time and space, allowing us to see how Max Vandenburg arrives at the Huberman household.

Vandenburg is a Jew in hiding; he travels from one basement to another, and eventually goes in search of Hans, whom he met in World War I when they were soldiers. Hans takes him in, at enormous risk to both himself and his family. Eventually, an incident makes Max fear for the family's safety and he slips away, only to reappear in the novel's final pages.

Zusak's writing is at times marred by some postmodern tricks -- inserting asides in boldface, some cloying commentary by Death -- but, overall, his style is lyrical and moving. Take, for example, this moment when Death reflects on taking Jewish souls from concentration camps:

"When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. When their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some cases were nailed into it by the sheer force of desperation, their spirits came toward me, into my arms, and we climbed out of those shower facilities, onto the roof, and up."

Liesel is a great character, plucky and smart. It would have been nice if Zusak had turned down the heavy attempts to make her work as a "book thief" some kind of tribute to the power of language when her daily life and her relationship with Rudy are far more interesting.

Writing fiction about the Holocaust is a risky endeavor. Most children learn about it in history class, or through nonfiction narratives like Eli Wiesel's "Night." Zusak has done a useful thing by hanging the story on the experience of a German civilian, not a camp survivor, and humanizing the choices that ordinary people had to make in the face of the Führer. It's unlikely young readers will forget what this atrocity looked like through the eyes of Death.